Author:

Terry Anderson

Abstract

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Abstract: The Online Tutoring Skills (OtiS) e-workshop described in this chapter makes a significant contribution to knowledge of how to effectively design and manage virtual conferences or e-workshops. In addition they provide a useful discussion and exemplar of means by which the content of these forums can be re-used and repackaged for wider and continuing use. The first contribution of the paper is a description of an innovative process for soliciting and evaluating content from within the community of practice.

This excellent paper ends with a discussion of a series of issues that arose during the e-conference and that could be described as a first look at best practice guide for e-workshop designers. I liked the article and I appreciate the serious conceptual and physical work put into organizing and documenting for re-use this professional development initiative.

Chapter
19: Reuse of Resources within Communities of Practice

I first experienced the tremendous cost savings potential of
virtual conferences when I organized what I believe was the first
professional development conference held on distributed digital
networks in 1992 (Anderson & Mason, 1993). This first
conference used a variety for pre-Internet (FidoNet, BitNet and
Usenet) and Internet mailing lists to distribute discussion related
to the International Council for Distance Education Congress held
in Bangkok. At the time I was a graduate student, with no travel
funds and was able to organize this entire virtual conference (with
the help of many volunteers) for the total cost of a few faxes to
Bangkok. The key to the economic advantage of virtual conferences
is the capacity to allow access to professional gatherings without
travel or other restrictions of place and in shifting the time
requirements to allow asynchronous participation. Since then there
have been many successful virtual conferences employing various
combinations of synchronous and asynchronous interaction. However,
few have been based on applicable theories related to development
of communities of practice or relevant knowledge management theory
nor have many evolved much beyond the "horseless carriage'
emulation of face-to-face seminars or conferences.

The Online Tutoring Skills (OtiS) e-workshop described in this
chapter makes a significant contribution to knowledge of how to
effectively design and manage virtual conferences or e-workshops.
In addition they provide a useful discussion and exemplar of means
by which the content of these forums can be re-used and repackaged
for wider and continuing use. The first contribution of the paper
is a description of an innovative process for soliciting and
evaluating content from within the community of practice. This was
done by soliciting case studies that describe both the content and
the context of an evolving field of professional expertise ? that
being on-line tutoring. Peers adjudicated the case studies and 35
were chosen from the 80 submitted. The second contribution was to
pioneer a sophisticated instructional design for the two weeks of
the e-workshop. This structure defined roles for participants
ranging from authors, to raconteurs, moderators and contributors.
Also delineated was a two-week schedule that mixed synchronous chat
sessions with asynchronous discussion groups, keynote presentations
and small group summary postings to plenary sessions. The structure
was designed to facilitate knowledge extraction and growth amongst
the community throughout the e-workshop. Finally, the paper helps
us to extend the learning across longer periods of time, by
documenting the process by which writing teams created chapters for
a book during a post workshop phase of the e-workshop.

This excellent paper ends with a discussion of a series of
issues that arose during the e-conference and that could be
described as a first look at best practice guide for e-workshop
designers. I liked the article and I appreciate the serious
conceptual and physical work put into organizing and documenting
for re-use this professional development initiative.

The authors use Wenger's familiar model of a community of
practice and with Preece's (2000) features of online community, to
provide a strong theoretical base to the workshop design. The
theory provides a scaffold to facilitate understanding of community
formation during this workshop and how discourse within the
community leads to knowledge construction and affirmation.

While I find the model and the description of the workshop
useful, I'm left with lingering doubts related to the efficacy of
the workshop from the participants' perspective. These doubts are
based upon my own participation in virtual conferences over the
years. Sorry, I meant e-conferences ? I'm still not quite with it
enough to preface most of my nouns with "e-" to gain currency! Do
the majority of participants really connect and develop critical
"mutual engagement" in virtual conferences? I know that I have
enrolled in many such conferences ? some I have followed
religiously, others I have skimmed through lightly at the end of a
busy day or week. Does reading the conferences alone count as
meaningful "joint enterprise" or "shared repertoire"? Are those who
read, but do not post, members of the community of practice? I
realize that attendance alone at a face-to-face event doesn't
guarantee meaningful participation or the development of the
necessary sense of awareness of the proceedings that Langer (1997)
refers to as mindfulness. But I'm left with a lingering suspicion
that the commitment of physical attendance with concomitant removal
of the distraction of other work responsibilities, email, telephone
and family intrusions, differentiates the extent and perhaps the
quality of participation in the e-workshop and thus the critical
'mutual engagement' may be missing from the communities thus
formed. Of course, this lingering doubt is merely a hypothesis and
begs some empirical verification. This is perhaps my only criticism
of this paper ? how do we know the level of commitment and
participation in the community of practice or more importantly of
development of personal or professional knowledge achieved by the
participants? The study provides no survey data, transcript
analysis of interaction, interview data, or even reports of the
numbers of interactive messages exchanged by the "over 100"
participants. I realize that such data is hard to gather as
evidenced by the pathetically low return rate of electronic surveys
from participants in my last virtual conference (Anderson, 1996). I
also realize the challenges of measuring community, social or
cognitive presence derived from the transcripts of these online
interactions conferences (Rourke, Anderson, Garrison, & Archer,
2001). These difficulties were motivations that led to my work with
Heather Kanuka on a book on e-research techniques (Anderson &
Kanuka, 2002) - he says, shamelessly promoting his own products
J.

This chapter gives us a first rate example of the way to design
a professional development activity based on sound theory and
facilitated by a team of dedicated and more important skillful
educators. However, the field is far too young to assume that
theoretically derived intervention will necessarily lead to quality
outcomes. These must be thoroughly tested. Of course the test
results themselves then contribute to honing and further
development of the theory.

Besides the theoretical strength of this chapter, the authors
make a major contribution by documenting their "lessons learned" in
a discussion of "online workshop management issues". The thorny
copyright issue is addressed and I'm pleased to see that the
workshop alerted participants to the fact that the "participants
are free to use, develop and adapt the case studies, materials,
ideas and exemplars developed in the e-workshop either to improve
their own practice or to develop the skills of others". This
certainly is in the spirit of open and free use of content,
facilitates maximum reuse and helps build a sense of the gift
culture that we need to counter the pressure for commercialization
of so much public knowledge today. However, a more systematic and
clear way to facilitate this re-use is to make clear who does own
the copyright ? I would assume the authors of the case studies or
the posters of responses. Despite the desire to have their content
reused, I think that many authors would prefer to retain the
copyright, but specifically allow reuse by others. Defining the
terms and formally licensing reuse of this type of text content is
supported through the Open Content license [www.opencontent.org] or more
recently through the exemplar work of the Creative Commons
initiative [www.creativecommons.org].
Creative Commons in particular, provides a very easy to use system,
accessed via a web-based wizard, to produces a series of licenses
detailing authority to use and re-use copyrighted materials. It
would be interesting to engage in a discussion on this forum of the
copyright, ownership and re-use expectations of both formal
presenters and the e-workshop respondents.

I found the suggestions for providing an appropriate mix of
synchronous and asynchronous activities of particular importance.
The synchronous activities in this case were text based, but it is
becoming increasingly easy to use a variety of IP based
audiographic products that I believe will increase humanization and
ease of synchronous interaction by supporting voice discussion. Of
course this will raise new access and re-use issues (relating to
the challenges of searching and indexing voice), but the tradeoffs
of text chat versus voice chat are worth investigating. Finally,
the authors highlight and illustrate ways to capture and re-use
(the focus of the book) the knowledge generated during the
workshop. As they argue, the effort to document and then provide
for community review the case studies of professional practice in
authentic contexts is a critically important and relatively
efficient way to document the realms of tacit knowledge that mark
professional practice. We need such systems to insure equitable
access to opportunities for professional growth and knowledge
building by all members of our society.

In summary, Harris and Higgison provide us with an illustration
of the way that development activities undertaken by practicing
professionals can be effectively and efficiently designed and
managed. They further illustrate how the content and interaction of
this activity can be repurposed for a variety of further work.
Together, and perhaps most importantly, these descriptions of a
real life model of an e-workshop, grounded in relevant theory,
further contributes to the evolving theory of online community
growth and its application to professional development.

References

Anderson, T. (1996). The Virtual Conference: Extending
Professional Education in Cyberspace. International Journal of
Educational Telecommunications, 2(2/3), 121-135. . Retrieved
May 21, 2001, from the World Wide Web: http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol3/issue3/anderson.html